I applied online. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at Canva (Sydney) in Apr 2023
Interview
The initial interview was scheduled 45 minutes, with no meeting title or interviewer role. He didn't introduce himself or tell me about his role or background. The role was for a ML engineer, but he started asking about full-stack skills. After telling me I'm not skilled for the role, he started telling me for five minutes about how great Canva is. At the end of the interview he was smirking at me, I told him about this and he cut the call
No leetcode. Technical round was implement clustering from scratch and basic evaluation script. Final interview was ML system design on classification problem with human intervention and behavioural questions. Overall it was not hard.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Implement clustering from scratch, basic evaluation script
3 interviews.
1. Hr call to initial screen
2. "Vibe coding" interview that uses AI tool
3. Interview loop for 3 hours
Including behaviour, ML design and coding round without AI.
HR screen where they asked about experience particularly if you have worked with TB or PB data processing pipelines.
Then an AI programming interview where you need to remove gender bias from some recommendations.
After this it's 4 more 1 hour interviews. ML System Design, ML System review, Pair programming without AI and a behavioural interview.
I also met an Engineering Manager to discuss the role which he described as primarily a software engineering role and that they don't do any model training.
Each interview only had one interview which in one instance the interviewer had pretty poor communication skills that caused confusion and wasted quite a bit of time. It also means that the interview outcome was subject to bias as there were no other interviewers to align with.
Most disappointing though, there was no meaningful feedback provided that I could take away from the experience and build on.